Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Theologian of the Year

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I’d be interested to hear what Dad thinks of this link — ‘The Door’ magazine (who I don’t know anything about at all) chooses their Theologian of the Year:

Perilous times call for bold theology.

Let’s face it. Evil is running rampant. Terrorists strike without warning. Corporate executives defraud the public and their own employees. Politicians tear apart the fabric of national unity for their own agendas. Popular culture has become a banal river of unadulterated trash, a “hellmouth” slowly dumbing down our sense of reality. The people are paralyzed by indecision, ennui or terminal cynicism.

Meanwhile, the ozone layer is perforated, glaciers are melting, and crazies set wildfires that denude the landscape. While Generation X passes the baton to Generation Y, adolescence is still hell, AND THERE’S ONLY ONE LETTER LEFT!

We need someone who can not only deconstruct the problem of evil, but kick it’s hiney; someone with a preternatural sense of comic timing and an eye for fashion.

We need Buffy.

Dad (along with other people) has been telling me for a while just how good of a show ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ really is. One of these days I may need to see if I can rent the DVD season sets and start working my way through it. Neat article, though.

Incidentally, The Door looks like it may be an interesting site to explore — from their ‘About The Door Magazine‘ page:

We satirize something we love — the Church, and more generally people of faith — with the hope that our prodding might generate some course corrections while inducing a laugh or two…or three.

The basis for The Door‘s mission is a scriptural injunction to mock idolatry. The prophet Elijah did it best, during his contest with the priests of Baal. But an expanded discussion is found in the Talmud, that compendium of Jewish oral traditions that we find a continuing source of light on New Testament understanding. The rabbinic teachers said Israel was forbidden to mock or jeer anyone or anything except idolatry. The prescribed epithet was, “Take your idol and put it under your buttocks!”

Laughter is good

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However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than perhaps you think for.

— Ishmael, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

The hunt is on: MT, MySQL, and PHP

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While I’ve done my best to track any changes I’ve made to Movable Type in my ‘MovableType’ archive category, I’ll freely admit it’s not organized quite as well as it could be.

However, it looks like there’s going to be a lot of good information regarding MT, MySQL, and PHP appearing soon, as Jonathan Delacour and Allan Moult start migrating their MT blogs to new installations. Jonathan will be writing from the perspective of a Windows user, Allan from that of a Mac OS X user. Definitely worth keeping an eye on in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, Shelley Powers sees the migration beginning, and immediately begins her hunt for the wild MT documenters. The game is afoot!

Erk – how did I manage this one?

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Okay, this is interesting. It appears that I’ve managed to mung up the code for my pages somewhere so that someone using Internet Explorer 5.2 under Mac OS X cannot leave a comment. Other browsers can, however. I’ll use the comments for this post as a testing ground to try to narrow things down.

Read more

Thoughts on EspressoBlog

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I’ve mentioned a couple times that I’ve been using EspressoBlog to make posts. In the process, I’ve come up with a few issues and ideas, and figured a post here (and TrackBack ping to Phil, since it works in EB now!) would work…

  • Issue: TrackBack gets turned off.

    I keep the ‘allow pings’ option in Movable Type turned on for every post — it may not get utilized much, but hey, why not? However, posting from EB seems to set the TB flag to ‘off’, requiring me to go back into my post through the usual MT interface and turn it back on.

  • Issue: the ‘HTML Tags & Blog List’ drawer and the ‘TrackBack’ drawer cover each other.

    This had me confused at first — I had the ‘…Blog List’ drawer open after logging into my blog, and then opened the ‘TrackBack’ drawer. Since they both slide out the right hand side of the window, and the ‘TrackBack’ drawer isn’t as wide as the ‘…Blog List’ drawer, at first I didn’t think the ‘TrackBack’ button had done anything. I clicked it again, and then I noticed the extra shadow effect that was appearing underneath the ‘…Blog List’ drawer. Oh! Closed the ‘…Blog List’ drawer, and viola, there was the ‘TrackBack’ drawer. Possible solutions: either put the ‘TrackBack’ drawer on the left side of the window (as that’s the side the button is on anyway), or see if there’s some way for one drawer to toggle the other — if one is open, then opening the other will close the first.

  • Issue: ‘Post (Don’t Publish!)’ seems to be broken.

    At least, it didn’t work for this entry! I’m assuming it’s supposed to act as a ‘save as draft’ option, but after posting this entry and hitting my site, there was the entry, definitely not in draft status. Not a biggie in this instance, but possibly could be in other instances.

  • Idea: could EB automatically log into a specific blog (or at least a server)?

    If I leave EB running this isn’t an issue, but if I quit and then re-launch it (for instance, due to logging out of my account on my ‘puter), then before I can post anything, I need to re-connect to my MT installation, then choose a specific blog. Since most people probably only ever need to connect to one server (and many probably only need to connect to one blog), could there be a ‘default server/default blog’ option(s) setting so that EB would automatically set up the connection upon startup?

I think that’s it for now…more as I think of them. Now, to post this, then hit the web-based log in to turn on TrackBack! ;)

Who says the Mac doesn’t have any software?

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One of the constant things I get from Wintel people is that “there isn’t any software for the Mac” — in fact, I heard this just the other day, talking with someone at work. I got to thinking about this this morning after…

  • Creating two .eps files with Adobe Illustrator 10 (Mac OS X native)…
  • Importing those .eps files into Adobe InDesign 2.0 (Mac OS X native)…
  • Exporting the file to a .pdf readable by Adobe Acrobat reader (Mac OS X native)…
  • Browsed the headlines from 46 different websites with NetNewsWire Lite 1.0 (Mac OS X only RSS reader)…
  • Read further on a few of the stories with Chimera (Mac OS X only Gecko-based web browser)…
  • And made a few posts to The Long Letter using EspressoBlog (Mac OS X only application for posting to MovableType or Blogger powered weblogs).

Anyway, that’s it. Just amused me.

Linkage

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I just noticed that both Falling Awake and db link to me. Nice to know someone else out there finds me worth checking in on for one reason or another — much appreciated!

Rearranging a bit

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I’ve done a bit of reorganizing to the sidebar, in an effort to group things together a bit more logically, and move sections that are more likely to be used closer to the top (above the ‘fold’, ‘Above the fold’ is a carryover from newspaper publishing. In print terms, it just means that the most important items should be on the top half of the page, so that they are seen when the paper is folded and lying face up. It’s the same concept on the web, only the ‘fold’ in this case is considered to be the bottom border of the visible area when the page first loads at a standard resolution (usually 800px by 600px).so to speak).

I decided to start off with the more ‘interactive’ elements — ‘Music of the moment’ and the most recent comments. While ‘MotM’ isn’t really interactive, the voyeuristic aspect to it has some of the same feel (at least, that’s my justification for keeping it towards the top).

After that we have the search form and the archives list, as they’re both related to finding older information, or information elsewhere on the site. The search form is one of those things that’s commonly ‘supposed to be’ above the fold, anyway, so this helps. Also, I’ve taken the calendar display off of the archive list. I’d debated its usefullness before, but finally made up my mind to remove it after reading Jonathan’s reasons for removing the calendar on his site (which I stumbled onto thanks to Burningbird).

Next come all the various links to other places to go, the Amazon voluntary paybox (which would be just as useful if I put it on an entirely seperate page with some horridly dry, academic-sounding title not likely to interest anyone, named the file something else entirely [and misspelled it to boot], and then didn’t post any links to it anywhere — but that’s another matter alltogether), the syndication link (almost as useless as the Amazon box, except that I occasionally use it for testing purposes), and the linkback to MovableType.

And, that’s about it for now. Woohoo?